The Subversive Worldview of Slow Horses

Jackson Lamb’s island of misfit spies is the best place on television.

This article contains spoilers through Season 3 Episode 5 of Slow Horses.

The third season of Slow Horses, Apple TV+’s magnificent, impertinent spy series, begins with a feint: two lovers chasing state secrets in Istanbul, followed by a thrilling boat chase across the Bosphorus that turns into a car chase that ends in tragedy. This is 007 territory, not the usual world of mangy MI5 rejects that the show has so adeptly built up. An adaptation of Mick Herron’s novels about a spy branch occupied by the supposed dregs of British intelligence, Slow Horses typically plays out in dirty cafés and gas-station forecourts, not the azure Instagram backdrops of European glitterati. So what are we doing here?

The cold open, I think, exemplifies what makes the series better than virtually anything else on television right now—its ability to be both a riveting espionage drama and an absurd workplace comedy, without ever flubbing the mix. The show delights in upending our expectations about what a spy story should be. In the most recent episode of the third season, “Cleaning Up,” River Cartwright (played by Jack Lowden) finds himself in a clandestine MI5 storage facility where the only thing between him and a heavily armed private militia is a panicky Welshman named Douglas who can’t remember the security-override codes. The tension is excruciating, even as the dialogue is pure ham. (Will Smith, the show’s creator, was a co-producer and writer on Veep.) The contrast befits a series whose conceit is that the spies regularly saving Britain aren’t the immaculately groomed, borderline-sociopathic charmers who have dominated our screens for the best part of a century; instead, they’re the losers, the slovenly and objectionable problem children who get stuck with one another because no one else can stand them. These are heroes of Slow Horses.

The show’s tonal blend is unusual: Its intricate plotting pays homage to the novels of John le Carré—whose later portrayals of British espionage could be just as threadbare and Brexit-afflicted as Herron’s universe—while its surly, bumbling characters sometimes feel ripped right out of The (British) Office. The first season of Slow Horses focused on River, a newish MI5 recruit with cherubic looks and physical ruthlessness who seems like he could be James Bond’s little brother—particularly when, while chasing a suspect through an airport, he hijacks a police car and then breaks the arm of an officer who won’t get out of his way.

The nervy, nine-minute sequence is revealed to be a training exercise, but River’s failure to stop a “bomber” from blowing up a train gets him relegated to Slough House, an island of misfit spies presided over by the exiled chief Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman). MI5’s headquarters in Regents Park is a sleek fortress run by the regal Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas); Slough House is a dank, moldering block in northeast London where Lamb, nested peacefully amid overflowing ashtrays and takeout boxes, wakes himself up by farting. Can you see the symbolism yet? If most spy dramas dwell in a glamorous, highly unrealistic milieu of Aston Martins and tailored tuxedos, Slow Horses has its characters wear primarily polyester and drive cars whose broken stereos are stuck on Coldplay. It’s not that the show can’t do big-budget set pieces—it can, as the meticulously staged action sequences attest. It just has a different thesis about what kinds of people deserve our attention.

The next time someone tells you that TV characters need to be likable, point them to Slow Horses. Lamb is disgusting, a wheezing, fingernail-picking, vindaloo-stained grub who berates his team, deploys flatulence as a weapon, and is perhaps the most preternaturally gifted spy in popular culture. River is the viewer’s bland escort into the world of the show—yet another instance of nodding toward more conventional storytelling before giving it the finger—but Lamb is the hook you can’t unreel yourself from. The question of how much of his grotesquerie is genuine and how much is armor matters less than Oldman’s relish for the role, his cheerful commitment to outright repugnance. Lamb is also more and more unreadable as the show progresses. Early, it was easier to see his hostility as a front, but recent episodes complicate his dynamic. (My only complaint about Slow Horses is that its short seasons—six episodes each—never feel long enough to process everything the show narratively stacks up.)

Lamb’s dollar-store spies, the “slow horses” of the title, aren’t nearly as useless as they’re made out to be, even if they are—like most of us—frequently sloppy, misguided, and inept. Lamb’s deputy of sorts, and the only person he professes to care about, is Catherine (Saskia Reeves), a frail-seeming recovering alcoholic with sharp instincts. Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar) and Sidonie (Olivia Cooke) are both excellent agents with caustic temperaments whose presence at Slough House seems to nod at the reception that forthright women receive in the workplace. Roddy (Christopher Chung) is an incel-ish tech genius with a terrible personality; Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) is a slob who abuses cocaine; Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan) is a compulsive gambler who gets off on danger. Most of them (Roddy excepted) seem at heart like decent people, a trait that distinguishes them from their reptilian counterparts at MI5. The show’s portrayal of British intelligence is devoid of heroism or strength of character; the governing impulse is self-protection, which Lamb’s spies fail at as reliably as they fumble firearms, leave top-secret documents on trains, and grumble over who forgot to buy biscuits.

My colleague Helen Lewis has written about how Slow Horses functions as an allegory for British decline—how the nation’s institutions have been fully co-opted over decades by ruthlessly ambitious and self-serving politicians. (In the Herron books, the politician Peter Judd, played in the show by Samuel West, is more transparently an avatar of Boris Johnson.) And it’s true that more often than not, the cases the Slough House agents are trying to crack stem from an MI5 failure and a botched cover-up. Yet over time, the triumph of Lamb’s spies in the face of constant, venal game-playing by their fancier colleagues starts to reinforce a worldview that’s less cynical than it might seem.

In the first season, River’s demotion seems meant to set up his inevitable return to MI5 proper, if he can only crack a big enough case or do something suitably audacious. But as the show goes on, it becomes clear that being summoned back to the viper pit at Regents Park would be his real punishment. The blessing in disguise for Lamb’s agents is that having all of their career prospects eliminated leaves them free to actually do intelligence work, without the distractions of trying to clamber up the greasy pole of political elevation. They can be loyal to one another, and even heroic, if not in a way that their bosses will ever recognize. This might make for a depressing real-world status quo, but on Slow Horses, it translates into exemplary television: the most unlikely champions saving the day (and themselves) in ways that only we, the viewers, can truly appreciate.